Fundraising `Breaks' Recalled In Secretary Of State's Office

SPRINGFIELD — Every year, around Labor Day, Karen Deering, an employee in the executive offices of then-Secretary of State George Ryan, had a curious encounter with Lynda Long, Ryan's longtime secretary.

Long would emerge from her office, walk up to Deering's desk and say, " `OK, since we're on break, here are your tickets,' " Deering recalled Long saying.

Long then would hand Deering an envelope containing tickets for a coming political fundraiser for Ryan, now Illinois governor.

This type of exchange, marked by an employee's unilateral declaration of a workday break, was common in the secretary of state's offices when the Ryan political machine turned to employees to raise money, according to dozens of interviews with current and former Ryan employees.

Though Illinois law forbids most political activity on state time and state premises, Ryan lieutenants sidestepped the prohibition by saying they were on break, the employees said. By most accounts, aides to Ryan's predecessors in the secretary of state's office did the same.

Passing out fundraiser tickets on the job was part of an aggressive ticket-sales culture embedded in the operations of the secretary of state, long a stepping stone for Illinois politicians.

But ticket-selling under Ryan has surfaced as a central element of the licenses-for-bribes scandal under federal criminal investigation, known as Operation Safe Road. New details emerging from the investigation portray an office that often squeezed workers harder or more blatantly to produce campaign money than previous administrations, and one that did little to dispel the notion that prolific ticket sales could lead to advancement.

According to federal authorities, drivers services workers under Ryan, motivated by pressure to sell fundraising tickets, issued driver's licenses to unqualified applicants in exchange for bribes, many of them in the form of Ryan fundraiser ticket purchases.

Federal investigators say they have traced at least $170,000 in bribe money to Ryan's campaign coffers. At least three highway crashes resulting in nine deaths have been linked to truck drivers who paid bribes to obtain licenses.

Ryan has not been accused of wrongdoing in the probe, which has led to the indictment of 30 people and the conviction of 22, including 12 former secretary of state employees.

Last month, authorities opened a new front in the case, charging Ryan's inspector general and longtime Kankakee friend, Dean Bauer, with racketeering and obstruction of justice for allegedly covering up or quashing investigations of ticket selling for licenses.

Now federal investigators have cast their net even wider, interviewing former secretary of state employees about political fundraising in other departments beyond the drivers services division.

The governor's supporters assert that the corruption under Ryan was caused by greedy freelancers, not by any organized push for campaign money. "There was no pressure," Ryan spokesman Dennis Culloton said last week.

Of former employees who have complained of pressure, Culloton said, "They're just saying what they claimed to have felt, and how do you refute personal feelings? There's never been any evidence."

Ryan, in recent remarks on the case, argued that he is something of a victim of the office's long tradition of political chicanery.

"(Corruption) was there when I was there, probably going to be there in the future. It's a part of the culture there, I guess," Ryan said last week.

While the scale of the current scandal is unprecedented, political ticket selling both by and to Illinois public employees "is nothing new," said Jim Baker, a Springfield attorney who filed a federal discrimination suit on behalf of a janitor who said he was given a less desirable assignment after refusing to buy a Ryan fundraising ticket.

But "the thing that surprised me was how well organized this was and regimented," Baker said ". . . (Ryan's) organization just seemed a little better organized. I'm not sure that's a compliment."

Ryan fundraiser tickets appeared in a variety of ways, and the demands or requests to buy them were not the same for everyone.

Some employees, like Deering, were handed unsolicited tickets at work. In comparing notes with co-workers, Deering said she found that executive office employees believed they were expected to pony up 1 percent of their salaries toward the purchase of tickets. Records show that in 1994, when Deering's annual salary was $35,004, she donated $350 to the Ryan campaign.

"They never came up to you and said you have to sell these to keep your job, but you kind of just knew," said Deering, who worked as a secretary for chief of staff Scott Fawell from 1993 to 1995, and elsewhere in the secretary of state's office until mid-1998.

Efforts to reach Long, who supplied Deering with the tickets, were unsuccessful. Ryan spokesman Culloton said Long, who is now Ryan's secretary in the governor's office, did not pressure anyone.